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[00:00:00] Todd Vaziri: What is color, Rob? What is color?

Color is like a fractal. The closer you look, the more complicated it gets. It's a very deep concept.

[00:00:10] Intro

[00:00:14] Rob Bredow: Welcome to the Lighter Darker podcast where we talk about the creative process of filmmaking and the art of visual storytelling. We're so glad you've joined us for our seventh episode. This is seven of twenty that we have planned for our first season and we release every other Tuesday. And today We have two guest co-hosts with us.

We're going to feature two movies that have both come out this previous weekend in the U.S. Gladiator II and Wicked. So joining us from Wicked is Anthony Smith. He's a visual effects supervisor in ILM's Sydney studio and has over 20 years of onset and post production visual effects experience. He joined us in '21 as an associate visual effects supervisor on Matt Reeves, The Batman. And he's won a VES award for outstanding compositing in a feature film. for Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. And he was most recently our visual effects supervisor in our Sydney office on Wicked.

So thank you so much, Anthony, for joining us on the show today.

[00:01:10] Anthony Smith: Thank you.

[00:01:11] Rob Bredow: You worked on Gravity,

[00:01:12] Anthony Smith: What was your role on the show?

I was one of the compositing supervisors alongside Mark Bakowski, who did Gladiator.

[00:01:20] Rob Bredow: There you go. Mark Bakowski was our head of department visual effects supervisor on Gladiator II. So small world and Anthony, you've worked both in London and now in Sydney for the last few years. So you've really worked all over the world in visual effects.

[00:01:33] Anthony Smith: Yeah. It's good. Travel. It's nice.

[00:01:37] Rob Bredow: And our next guest co-host with us is Ed Randolph, who's a visual effects producer in our London studio. And he was most recently the visual effects producer for Gladiator II, working closely with Mark Bakowski. Ed has worked in visual effects production for over 15 years. He was the visual effects producer on a bunch of award winning films, including big ones like Ready Player One, Star Wars Episode 8, and Episode 9.

Ed, also was the visual effects producer on the groundbreaking virtual concert experience Abba Voyage, which is playing in London and is a total blast if you ever get a chance to see it. So, welcome to the show, Ed.

[00:02:13] Ed Randolph: Thank you very much. No wonder I feel tired going through that.

[00:02:16] Rob Bredow: That's right, that's a lot of work. And as usual, my cohost Todd Vaziri

[00:02:21] Todd Vaziri: Hey, I'm Todd Vaziri. I'm a compositing supervisor and artist at ILM.

[00:02:26] Rob Bredow: and our producer, Jenny.

[00:02:27] Jenny Ely: Hello, Jenny Ely. I'm a production manager at ILM.

[00:02:31] Rob Bredow: And I'm Rob Bredow, I'm the Chief Creative Officer of Industrial Light and Magic and SVP of Creative Innovation for Lucasfilm. And we all work together in the visual effects, animation, and immersive entertainment industries. So we're gonna get today's show started, with a few questions from the mailbag.

And then we're gonna do One Final, One CBB with Ed and Anthony, which is gonna be really fun. And our main topic is all gonna be about world building and these huge, complex movies. How do we create these environments? How do we create these creatures and everything that goes into building these worlds?

So, we're going to have a fun chat about that Jenny, do you want to get us started with a couple questions from the mailbag?

[00:03:07] Questions from the Mailbag

[00:03:07] Jenny Ely: Sure. Our first question is from Ewerton. Ewerton says, I recently graduated in interactive media development. I have some experience related to visual production, such as 3D modeling, scene composition, game and level design, and I would love to hear about what are the first steps someone who intends to join this field should take.

[00:03:28] Rob Bredow: Love that question. Anthony, I don't know if your first steps were similar to this or what your background was or any advice you have for, um, Ewerton, if I'm saying your name incorrectly, Ewerton, I apologize if I am.

[00:03:39] Anthony Smith: My, what were my first steps? It's really difficult. My first steps were, I was doing a sort of a media computer arts degree in the UK. And it was a four year degree. And the third year of that degree, I had to do a work placement. So I had to have a job that was kind of associated with that degree.

And there was a lot of web design going on back then. Pretty much 90 percent of the jobs were involved in web design and I did not want to do web design at all. I wanted to, I was interested in VFX and what I did was I got my CV and I made a little reel of little bits and pieces that I put together and I went on foot around to all these posthouses in Soho in London, just walked into every reception that I could find and said, Please let me be a runner for you.

Literally, let me, let me just be there, and absorb things, and I can get clients lunches, can do the shopping, whatever you need. It's slightly different today, I'd say. There's a lot more qualifications out there, and there's more official ways to, to kind of get into the industry. But, I think the idea of just sort of putting yourself out there as much as you can and getting your face in front of other people and showing your enthusiasm I don't think that's changed. So regardless of the lack of qualification or qualification, it's getting there and talk to people and show your enthusiasm and that That's what worked best for me back then

[00:05:05] Rob Bredow: Yeah, was your first foot in the door at a big company or at a smaller boutique?

[00:05:09] Anthony Smith: It was a smaller place I had a very strange thing where um when I was doing the, literally running around Soho on foot with my, with my little DVDs and handing them in, I went into, uh, I managed to get an interview at a tiny television place, which, and their address was 9 Neill Street in London. and I mistakenly turned up at 9 Knoll Street in London for my interview.

Uh, found out that it was the wrong place. It was actually a different visual effects facility. Sprinted across town. I had my interview, very disheveled, but I got the job. It was a tiny TV company. and it turned out that when I left that company, I wanted to work on movies. And, I applied to Framestore.

Who was doing Harry Potter at the time. Harry Potters. And I really wanted to go over there and work on some Harry Potter movies. And it weirdly turned out that they were in 9 Knoll Street, the place that I initially mistakenly turned up

So, very, very odd little, uh, situation that occurred there. And that's where I ended up, yeah.

So, I started small, in TV. Ended up at Framestore, doing movies.

[00:06:19] Jenny Ely: I think it's a really good idea to even look for jobs that aren't exactly what you want to do long term, whether, you know, if you want to be an artist, you know, look for, like you said, a runner job or a production job because all that's going to do is make you better qualified to work with the people around you who are doing those jobs when you get into being an artist or, you know, a higher level production or whatever you're gonna do

[00:06:38] Anthony Smith: For me it was just anything to get through the doors.

[00:06:41] Ed Randolph: Yeah.

[00:06:41] Anthony Smith: Once you're through the doors, you meet the people. You can, I learnt the software in the evenings once everyone had gone home. All those things are supplementary, but once you're in the door, then things can open up.

[00:06:53] Rob Bredow:

Yeah. I know a lot of people in this industry and myself included started at smaller studios, and I think one of the advantages there.

Is you get to wear a lot of hats. If there's only 20 people in the company, those 20 people have to do all the jobs. And you know, whether that's literally starting as a runner or starting, let's say I got to start as a junior artist, but I also had some technical skills. So I did some programming and I ended up, you know, over time as that company grew, I got to run the R\&D department and get all these different experiences on different shows, which was a really good way to kind of kickstart my career.

Um, Ed, did you start similarly? or what was your background like? What would you recommend for Ewerton?

[00:07:27] Ed Randolph: So I, I started off in editorial as a runner, like on the production side, and actually started with, Death at a Funeral, which was quite a small film here. Then I think they did a remake in the States, but the one here, well, I'd say here in the UK was directed by Frank Oz,

[00:07:40] Rob Bredow: oh wow,

[00:07:41] Ed Randolph: which was an amazing experience for a year sort of hanging out with him. He didn't do the voices until literally the last day.

[00:07:47] Rob Bredow: Wow

[00:07:47] Ed Randolph: He held off, he kept us, kept us hanging on for that, but that was, that was great.

[00:07:50] Rob Bredow: Years of getting to work Frank Oz early in your career.

[00:07:53] Ed Randolph: Yeah. which was great. And then, through editorial, similar to, Anthony, running around Soho, dropping off drives, that kind of stuff, got to know the visual effects houses.

And then I moved into a small boutique visual effects house, Base Black, which is no longer with us, but they did, they were small, but did great work on Harry Potter's and Narnia's and stuff like that. Uh, and like, exactly like you say, those sort of places where it's 20, 30 people, You kind of see are involved with everything, uh, for better and worse, but it's, it's a great learning experience.

And I think to echo a bit what Anthony was saying about you just getting your, you know, showing your face, getting your foot in the door, particularly in production, because there's no diploma for doing production, but I think it applies to any job worrying about having the perfect reel or the perfect CV and all that sort of stuff.

When you're that age. I wouldn't worry so much about that. It's so much about your personality. Do people like you? Do they think I want to spend a lot of time in a room with this person, you know, when things could get stressful and stuff like that. I think showing a bit of common sense and just an amiable personality is just as important if not more so than that perfect reel or CV.

[00:09:02] Rob Bredow: Yeah, it's great advice.

[00:09:03] Todd Vaziri:

Uh, one thing I want to add on to what Ed said is that there's, particularly with Hollywood and any creative field, you can talk to 20 different people and how they made it up through the business and you're going to get 20 different stories. There's no one path. There's no five paths.

Everybody has a different story of how the door was opened for them. The one consistent thing that you'll see about anybody who has had success in creative fields is they have to know their stuff. they have to know how to work with people, which is, uh, a challenge you know, for anybody who doesn't, you know, it's a team sport.

We're, we're all here as a team, and to show up, but just to, to understand that. there's no one path cause it's so easy to get discouraged if in your second year, you're not doing the exact thing you wanted to do when you were dreaming about working in the industry, it is going to take time, but, do not get discouraged by the fact that and understand the fact that there is no one path, unlike many other careers where there's a relatively standard operating procedure.

You get this degree, you do an internship here, you do this, there, an apprenticeship, it's not like that in Hollywood and, visual effects is part of that as well. We all have different stories but once you're there, show up. Be friendly, be the person that people can rely on and all the hard stuff you will figure out.

You will figure out the software, you will figure out the system, whatever the system is, you will be able to figure that out, but show up.

[00:10:35] Rob Bredow: Yeah. I think you're hearing a lot of consistent thoughts, especially about getting your foot in the door and getting a chance to kind of show what you can do at any level. If you can be a reliable runner, that can be a perfect first step on to a successful career as you're hearing in this room. Jenny, can you take us to our next question?

[00:10:52] Jenny Ely: Sure. Our next question is from Tristan. Tristan says, I am a newly graduated computer graphics compositing student. During my graduation thesis work, I dug deep into color management workflows. My question is, how do you handle color management at ILM? How does the communication go between on set people and post production people?

[00:11:13] Rob Bredow: This question could be an entire show, I think.

[00:11:16] Todd Vaziri: What is color, Rob? What is color?

Color is like a fractal. The closer you look, the more complicated it gets. It's a very deep concept.

[00:11:26] Rob Bredow: So let's keep this high level because we do want to cover a couple other topics. And even if we didn't, if we wanted to dive into this at all, we'd need five or ten hours. But let's just talk a little bit about CDLs on set and some continuity through the process and the way we try to respect that and improve it kind of as we go through incrementally.

Is that a useful overview? Probably?

[00:11:45] Jenny Ely: Do you want to start with what a CDL is?

[00:11:46] Rob Bredow: Yeah, I was just going to ask Anthony, do you want to dive in a little bit and give a little bit of an overview? Want Todd or I to do that?

[00:11:52] Anthony Smith: I can talk about it in the context of Wicked, actually, you know, because as we do on many, many movies, at the moment, there's some creative decision making that occurs on set. They usually have someone called a DIT, whose job is to sometimes dial, dial a bit of color into the video feed that the director or the DP might be seeing. and that dialing is recorded. on a per take basis. So we know what that person did at that time. And that information comes to us in post. And we often look at our work using that same setup. And it's all determined by some very, very clever people to make sure it's working correctly, cleverer than me.

And, it's not always the best thing. Often we keep it, we respect it, because it is a decision that was made on set. But there are times when it may need to be changed. Either, sometimes it's the client that actually decides to change these things. Sometimes, we may propose a change to some of these things, these CDLs, to offer up a different look.

And for me, the most common situation where this may need to change is when Pretty much most of something that's been shot is a chroma key, a blue screen, a green screen, where no one really knows what's back there yet. They have an idea, but color wise, like Todd just said, what is color?

Yeah, it could be, it could be anything. So the dialing is very much guesswork, and often you find that it's not necessarily appropriate for what you replace these things with. so sometimes we change things. Usually in collaboration with our clients, just so everyone understands what's being changed and why.

[00:13:28] Rob Bredow: yeah,

[00:13:29] Anthony Smith: yeah, they're interesting little things that occur on set that we have to deal with in post.

[00:13:34] Rob Bredow: So let me try to set, like, the overall context here for someone who may never have thought about the way color travels down from set into editorial and then post production. But as Anthony shared, on set, the DIT, who is responsible for making sure all that digital negative gets recorded that we'll be making those color adjustments and that might be the monitor that everyone's looking at on set and they may be making notes, the DP might be giving feedback constantly, but a little more saturation, a little less, whatever the notes are, a little bluer.

And that's all stored in that CDL that we're talking about, which is a color decision list. So that it's like an editorial decision list in EDL, but it's for color and it stores basically like the same kind of color corrections you're used to on your TV. Saturation, hue, offsets. It's very straightforward color corrections that can be applied.

But the nice thing is, the way the whole system works, is we work on the original camera negatives the whole time. So,our digital files are stored without that color. And then we do all the work, and then we look at them when we bring them up on the screen. We apply that CDL, that color decision list, so we see it in the same way the DP was seeing it on set.

And as Anthony is flagging here, sometimes they didn't have enough information to make the right decision. They may not have known the cut, they may not have had enough context to be able to make that color correction, they just made something that was pleasing on the monitor at the time, got everybody understanding what they were shooting, and then they can move on, and then it's our job.

To make sure we're pulling all the pieces together, make it as smooth as possible in the cut. And then as we've referenced once before, there's still a color timing or a DI, a digital intermediate session that's gonna happen after us. So we make every shot look as good as it can in the context of all the other shots, maybe adjusting those CDLs, those color decision lists as needed throughout the process.

We can keep one for every single shot, every single cut in the movie. and then the final step is gonna be the final sweetening that happens in the DI session where they have very sophisticated tools. They start with all those CDLs, ingest all of those, and then make improvements to the whole color through the whole show after we do our final work in visual effects.

[00:15:21] Todd Vaziri: Yeah, the key point there that I want to pound away at is the fact that All of this is flexible. We are not baking in a look as in flattening an image to say, okay, they made this decision when they were on set. We want this scene to be really warm. Well, we at ILM, we work on, what I like to call a rich negative.

We take those decisions into account in our CDL, but it's just like a filter. It's a lookup. We are working on a full range, digital, uh, negative, as we go along, a floating point, it's all buzzword compliant so that those CDLs can change throughout production. Then in DI, they could swing it around.

We want to make sure that we give something that's rich and high fidelity, that will work under any color timing circumstances but will work the best with that CDL. with that color decision list and one, creative way. And, this is a fully creative process. The technical aspects of it all, are, you know, what we build upon, but it's a fluid creative process on the day it may be a very warm sequence, let's say a golden hour sequence. But there's going to be a computer graphics creature that is prominent blues or greens. Well, they don't know what that creature is going to look like just yet. We may have maquettes, we may have something on set to help guide that color.

But they may totally swing it to, golden hour in the color decision list. Well, then we look at it, we bring in our creature and it's like, wow, it doesn't look blue or green at all because it's getting washed out by that warm color decision list. So then we talked to the client and like, well, what do you think about this?

Do you want it to blend in with the photography that way? Or do you really want to make that blue green? So then we have to go back and forth on that. It's just all creativity, in service of the story, in service of a final product that just looks like it was all shot in camera.

[00:17:19] Rob Bredow: And the nice thing about the modern color management systems is it's pretty well defined and you can incrementally improve the colors through every step of the production. So you're seeing a better version in the Avid during editing than we've ever seen before. And then as visual effects shots go in, they just get better.

And then in the final DI is further polished from there. So it's a nice incremental smooth process, thanks to some of these standards, like CDL, which has been very, very useful.

[00:17:42] One Final, One CBB

[00:17:42] Rob Bredow: Okay. That takes us to our first feature. We're going to dive into one final. And one CBB. And Ed, we're going to start with you. The idea behind this feature is for us to talk about a show where you had a couple of shots we can talk about.

One is a shot you're unusually proud of. You just feel really great about that shot when you see it in the movie. The CBB is the shot that could be better, and it's for any reason. It could be because it was really hard. It could be because the edit changed, it could be because of lots of reasons, but these are always fun to dive into, even on the huge movies that we work on, there's always something that could be better.

So we, we like to talk about both the good and the bad, or the good and the could be better on this podcast. So Ed, do you have some, a story in mind?

[00:18:19] Ed Randolph: I do. And the one for the, for favorite one that sprang to mind immediately is from Ready Player One. And that's a massive film with massive shots in it, so much going on. But actually the shot I was, I thought about straight away was an extreme closeup of Parzival, the main character. And it was, the shots called for fact fans, GMT 40

and, I thought about that shot because it was one of the very first shots that we rendered high res. And because that was for us, at least for ILM it was a full CG show. For a year, at least, we were just dealing with previs, mocap processing, facial processing, and you didn't really see anything colored in for a long, long time.

And I actually, I dove into the old notes on this shot and I can see the first note on that shot was one year before we saw this render, which is crazy, but the render looked amazing. And, it just, I think it gave everyone so much confidence. Like this, I mean, this is just like this, this is almost a nothing shot.

Think of what the show is going to look like when, you know, it's all colored in. It's all rendered. and I actually looked at the old Steven Spielberg notes of it and he said, that's one of the most amazing closeups in the movie. So he was happy too. So I'm glad that I,

[00:19:28] Rob Bredow: That's great.

[00:19:29] Ed Randolph: I picked that, yeah.

[00:19:30] Rob Bredow: So Ed, this shot that you're describing, I know there's a million closeups of him in the film, but where does it occur in the order of the film? Was it towards the beginning? Is it just one in the middle that just blinks right by?

[00:19:40] Ed Randolph: It's just before one of the races through, the Oasis and he's giving a bit of a standoff with Artemis, you know, close up of the eyes, revving the engines. and it's just a rack focus from Artemis to him and his face just looks great. You know, all the water in the eyes and, you know, the skin looks great and it just.

It's incredible the amount of work that went on with our pipeline, previs, animation, like I said, all the processing, just to get to that point where you see that one shot fully rendered. And Ed Cologne, the lighting supervisor, was keen to tell me they didn't use any, de noise on It very proud of that

[00:20:16] Rob Bredow: It was brute forced all the way.

[00:20:18] Ed Randolph: Yeah. Um,

[00:20:19] Rob Bredow: That's a super rewarding final. So what sprung to your mind when you were thinking about a CBB?

[00:20:25] Ed Randolph: Well, I thought it's a bit tricky as a producer because I'm like, it's my chance to dove in with supervisors. I don't think they quite get up to my standard, but this is, this is less of a sort of creative CBB, but it's, and this will send a shudder down the spines of most people who are involved with it.

The shot was called DOD 110 and it's from Spectre, the James Bond film DOD standing for day of the dead. And it was the opening shot of the film, and it's a monster. It's like, 6,000 frames, four minutes long. five plates stitched together. And the visual effects work in it wasn't hugely complicated.

There's some crowd extensions, wire removals, environments, stuff like that. But the thing that absolutely killed us right to the final day of the show was throughout the shot were loads of variable re speeds. And the cleanup of those re speeds just went on and on and on. And, we counted at the end of the show, there were 45 people had touched this

shot. And because it was so big, we couldn't transfer it quickly to Technicolor where they were viewing it. We had to load it on a drive, run around Soho, like one in the morning, drive to Technicolor. They'd look at it and they'd point out all the problems still. And there are still problems in that shot.

Not that anyone would ever know unless you'd been through this experience. They're tiny, tiny, but I looked at it again this morning and you can still see it. But again, only if you know where to look. And the shot's still, it's still a great shot. But, um, yeah.

[00:21:46] Rob Bredow: There's only so much polishing. There's only so much time involved in the movie. And like you're saying, in the context of the film, it served the purpose it needed to serve. But boy, those things that may even seem straightforward, hey, it's just a quick re time. when piled on top of other things can be quite involved.

[00:22:03] Ed Randolph: It's, it's maddening. I mean, actually on Gladiator II, our very last shot was, was a respeed cleanup as well.

[00:22:08] Rob Bredow: There you go.

[00:22:09] Ed Randolph: There's no quick fix to thosethings. You just, it's just hours of work

[00:22:12] Todd Vaziri: It's weird how when they do the retimes in the edit, it always looks better than when we do it on our, the real shots. It's like, why is the low resolution? it's so when, you're running a shot at a hundred percent and then the editors ask for a little speed up and then go back to a hundred percent, it's like, well, that may work for the main character, but everybody in the background, all of a sudden got a little fast and then got a little slow and you're, and then we're always like, okay, do we paint that out?

Do we run that at speed? Speed and try to dissolve it together again. And then the artifacts, when it's just a 5 percent speed up or slow down, the artifacts are coming in because the tools are imprecise and sometimes, sometimes it works on the first try and sometimes most of the time it doesn't. Oh man, I didn't, I didn't, I've seen that shot a lot.

I didn't even know there were variable retimes in that shot. So well done

[00:23:01] Ed Randolph: I think some of them are there just to spite us. I can't see any reason.

[00:23:05] Anthony Smith: The tricky thing is with retimes, when editorial do it, and some editors really like their retime, And all those sort of subframe interpolated frames just need to match. But our retime maybe gives a slightly different result, but it's got to match. So you have to spend more time just getting it into exactly that place.

That can be frustrating at times.

[00:23:28] Rob Bredow: Uh, what, uh, final and CBB did you bring for us, Anthony?

[00:23:31] Anthony Smith: Well, first of all, I love that Ed remembers the shotcodes. That says a lot. Uh, I remember my shot code as well. My shot was called IA 500, which is, you know, it says a lot for me that I remember that very clearly because it was, I think, like 11 years ago. It is from Gravity, which is, one of the most special movies that I've worked on in visual effects.

Very, very good experience. Longest project I've ever done. And I remember when I first came onto that show, because it was entirely prevised before it was shot. So we could work out all the technicalities of the shoot. I remember watching some previs, and it didn't really quite sink in when I first watched it.

Quite the demands of, of what it would entail to achieve those long shots. or the tech that had already been thought about before I even arrived. But when I watched it, I was fortunately able to watch the entire movie because they'd pre vis pretty much the whole thing. And there was one shot, and it was this shot that just really resonated with me amongst all of the chaos and events that take place in that movie.

And it was this shot, and it's the, it's, IA stands for interior airlock. It's where Sandra Bullock's character, Ryan Stone, finally, for the first time, gets back to the space station and goes inside the airlock and takes off the suit. And, it's a beautiful shot. I think it's between two and three minutes long.

It was much longer, but there was a time when we had to get the movie cut down. So we had to kind of creatively shorten the shot

[00:24:58] Rob Bredow: in a continuous shot?

[00:25:00] Anthony Smith: In a continuous shot.

Yeah. So we had to design, and I did this in, in the comp actually, try and try and think about the most appropriate times where we could achieve in a nice way.

Trimming the shot down. but it, it just, it was a shot that always just resonated with me from the moment I saw the previz and I thought, I want to do that shot. And I was a comp supervisor, so I wasn't, wasn't really supposed to be doing the shots. But I assigned myself that shot because I really wanted to do it.

It was a tough one because I still had my comp team to look after, so during the days I would look after my comp team and give notes on their work, and in the evenings I would do my shot. And do my own dailies at very, very late hours, of, render the shot, go over to the stereo monitor, put some glasses on, pretend I'm doing my own dailies with an artist, write down all my own notes, go back to my desk, do my notes, go back to the, back to the shot again.

[00:25:52] Todd Vaziri: Is this the shot of her slowly, the camera slowly rotating and she's in a fetal position

[00:25:59] Anthony Smith: she ends up in a fetal position, yeah

[00:26:00] Todd Vaziri: and ends up in the fetal position. with her umbilical. That is a beautiful shot.

[00:26:05] Anthony Smith: It's a beautiful shot. Yeah. And even in previz, I knew.

[00:26:09] Todd Vaziri: Everything that happened up to that point was just pure chaos and drama and heart pounding excitement and that is where that sits in the movie for everybody to catch their breath.

[00:26:20] Anthony Smith: Yeah.

[00:26:20] Todd Vaziri: It's, it's stunningly beautiful.

[00:26:22] Anthony Smith: Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's why it resonated. I was just fortunate enough to be, I was nice and early. I was thinking about the movie, from a comp supervision point of view, that that show was. extremely challenging because you've got to assign out work, right, to different artists and how do you assign out a three, four, five minute shot and actually split it up appropriately between all of you, your team.

This one was just one I wanted all to myself. So I kind of took it, took it on board. but yeah, I'm very proud of that. It got a double page spread in Cinefex, which I thought was stunning. Yeah, very, very proud of that. That's my, that's my favorite shot.

[00:27:00] Rob Bredow: That's a fantastic example of a beautiful final. What CBB did you bring us?

[00:27:05] Anthony Smith: My CBB is from a different movie, and I don't remember the shot code, which maybe says a lot. I didn't comp this one. It was from Sherlock Holmes. And in Sherlock Holmes, there is, there's a sequence where, there's a lot of explosions going on. It's again another long shot, where Robert Downey Jr. is running toward camera, camera's tracking back, and things are exploding all around him. and Chas Jarrett was the supe, and he shot some, incredible elements, all separate explosions, separate from Robert. and it was just one of those shots where you could keep going forever.

You could keep adding elements, you could keep adding debris, sparks, embers, things bouncing off him.

And it was certainly, oh, we could just add this. Do you want to add a thing there? We could do that. And eventually it got to the point where you just gotta, you gotta cut, kill it. We're done. We have to be done. But it was definitely one of those shots where it's, again, a long shot, potential for so much more.

But it was really effective, you know, it did a great job in the movie and another good one, but we had to can it, or kill it,

[00:28:08] Rob Bredow: You had to get to the end of it. Had to get the movie in the theatres Yeah, at some point you've got to deliver something, yeah.

That's great. Well, great.

[00:28:15] Worldbuilding

[00:28:15] Rob Bredow: Well, that takes us to our final topic, our main topic, where we're going to talk about worldbuilding we're going to use Wicked and Gladiator II as our examples, Anthony, just having finished Wicked and Ed just having finished Gladiator II, and we're going to avoid any big spoilers. I guess there aren't a lot of spoilers for Wicked, as people have heard the music and seen the show. but we're gonna avoid major spoilers, uh, since those movies are both just recently in theaters. Here in the U. S., it just came out this past weekend. but this is gonna be really fun to talk about the scale and scope.

And both of these finals and CBBs that you were highlighting are on shots and on shows with terrific complexity. And terrific complexity of world building. And certainly, Gladiator II and Wicked fall into that category as well. So let's just dive right in talking about some examples. The opening shot of Wicked, which does appear in the trailer, although just for a moment, it's much, much longer in the film, has a lot of heavy lifting, hundreds of elements and all these pieces that have to come together to make that shot just right, do you just want to talk a little bit about the process that goes into world building, uh, from beginning to end and some of the care and feeding that it took to get a shot like that, out through the process, Anthony.

[00:29:27] Anthony Smith: Well, I was thinking about just the word world building and what that process was from the beginning of my time on this show. I was fortunate enough to start on the show, I think a few months before they were about to shoot and obviously arriving on a show like that where creative decisions have been made already at the time when I arrived and I see my task is try and figure out what's the lay of the land here, what decisions have been made, what is liked, what is not liked.

There's set plans that have been created. There's concepts out there. There are costume designs out there. There's a lot of stuff that's been done on the production design side, on the client side with Nathan Crowley. and the first task is find all the things, look at all the media. just kind of get yourself into the, into that world, really, because you're going to have to build more of it.

So what's the foundation? and start reading the notes, and then you kind of start to understand a bit of a guideline, a bit of a framework within which you can work. And then it's a case of building from there. This show, as Gladiator probably did as well, had some quite extensive sets.

They really did form a grounding for what we did, and we had to build from them literally, and also extend entire worlds, because we had some shots that were completely CG, did not have a set, but they had to creatively reference everything that had already been created.

[00:30:50] Rob Bredow: Just to give people a sense, you started very early on this show. Things had not started shooting, but the production designer had been on even well before then. So you're onboarding yourself in the production, you know, when we talk about world building, they're the ones who started, they're the ones who, kind of initially authored this world and got a sense of, of what it's going to look like.

And that is sort of our job is to try to seamlessly integrate into that.

[00:31:14] Anthony Smith: Yeah, yeah, and sort of take all the different threads of what their world is, and kind of make it into a cohesive, brief, I suppose, for the artists. It's like, they like this thing and they like this thing. We've got to build this extension or something else that needs to fit into the rules that have already been set, by certain people.

Go. And, often artists. As is great and should be, they go off and they branch off into other new directions. And it's always about kind of, that maybe doesn't fit quite as well. Let's leave that aside. Let's kind of, we want to, we want to offer the clients new options and new ideas, but always respecting the decisions that have been made.

[00:31:54] Rob Bredow: Yes.

[00:31:54] Anthony Smith: which was part of the challenge of Wicked. We had things like, concept designs from the production design side. of the entire city from a distance. Landscapes, beautiful concepts, but the city looked like it was very translucent, made of a lot of green glass. It was the sort of thing that looked gorgeous in a landscape, but we knew that the sets they were building were not made of green glass, you know, up close they were solid walls.

So we had to kind of marry these things together. How do we architecturally respect the distant view and want it to look glorious and gleaming, but up close it still works when they tilt up and they look up at these buildings. What, what's the connection there? Even though, realistically they wouldn't really connect, it's finding a balance.

So that was a big, big challenge. but when it came to that opening shot, which is a huge journey, it begins from a plate shot in the castle. And it goes out into full CG journey through, a lot of the idea was descriptive from John, the director, including We're kind of building the world with simple boxes even, sort of cereal boxes and things, and sort of this is the journey I want. At this point in the music, I want to be seeing this, and then this event occurs, and then I want to be seeing this, and it's, there's a lot of reveal that occurs in that shot. It's very much based on timing and association with the music, which cannot be changed. This is a musical. So it was an interesting process going through that.

Yeah, fascinating. Really good to have a lot of base creative that you can work from as well.

[00:33:26] Rob Bredow: It's such an interesting Uh, you were talking about gravity earlier and the length of those shots and the kind of editorial decisions that are made in a single shot. And then here you have another example of that for the opening shot of Wicked where you've got one long continuous shot and multiple beats that have to happen at certain moments in that scene to time out to the music.

So very editorial choices that the director is making and then your team is executing with the cameras, with the blocking, with the environment modeling to actually be able to execute on those requests.

[00:33:55] Anthony Smith: It was huge. Yeah, the music was obviously a key thing in this movie and that's not the only occasion where we really were tied to specific events that needed to occur with specific sounds in the music. There are, I don't know what you'd call them, there's sort of, there are sounds or tunes that are associated with creatures or, a thing that occurs. So we had to time those things. It's very much an editorial thing, but, yeah, heavily tied to the visual effects.

[00:34:23] Rob Bredow: Editorial and animation, and in this case even modeling, and creating those worlds to make sure the ridge is the right height so when the camera pops over it and the trees reveal the, people walking on the yellow brick road, it happens at exactly the right moment.

[00:34:36] Anthony Smith: Yep, and in comp as well, revealing a rainbow at exactly the right time to go with a little twinkling sound. All of those little things are all tied together. It's great.

[00:34:44] Rob Bredow: The movie is so successful and so emotional the way the music ties so beautifully to the visuals. So the team did a fantastic job with the world building on that. Ed, let's throw it to you and, in Gladiator II, similarly, they did. A lot of big practical builds, but they didn't build all of Rome in that era.

And there were a lot of shots that took place. And I remember seeing some of the early work that was done. This was done over quite a period of time with a lot of planning and a lot of cohesion between the physical sets that were in different locations and the virtual set that would tie them all together.

I'm really interested to hear a little bit about the world building process that you guys did in Rome and the Colosseum.

[00:35:21] Ed Randolph: Well, as you say, the sets were massive, and it's a bit of a double edged sword with us because obviously it's a real place. It's Rome. There's, you know, there's a lot of experts out there.

There's a lot of photography, which is great for reference and building that world. But then everyone also knows what it's meant to look like. So you've got to make sure you've got that reality there. Fortunately, Pietro Ponti, our supervisor, is Italian and there's a lot of Italians there.

So they've got some very real world experience of all that. But we were, you know, really just wanted things looking big and impressive. He, you know, he wasn't so much about, there was a historical advisor on there, which I think he listened to sometimes when he wanted to, but really he just, you know, he's a cinematic guy.

Uh, he wants it to look fantastic. So we kind of have a bit of free reign to, if we want to make certain buildings like the Colosseum or, you know, surrounding buildings bigger, go for it, It's going to look great on the screen. That's what we should be doing. It's not, you know, don't, don't hold back.

[00:36:16] Rob Bredow: It's not a documentary you're making of Gladiator. It's, it's a, it's a cinematic experience. And if anybody knows how to point the camera and make something more dramatic, it's somebody like Ridley Scott who has been doing this for all these years. what is the interaction like, between your teams, Ed, and the production teams, and the, you know, The on set crew and the production designers, and as you're filtering and studying and reading all that information and launching the crews on that, just describe a little bit for folks how that interaction works on a movie of this scale.

[00:36:49] Ed Randolph: Well, we'll be sent an awful lot of material from the shoot. and beforehand concepts, you know, we've got Ridley's own concepts coming through, which are great to see. you're not quite sure where you're going with it yet. You just store it, you know, you're absorbing it all by thinking, okay, okay, logging it all back there, making sure it's all somewhere someone's going to be able to find in a few months time when someone says, I remember that drawing I did in June.

It's all that kind of thing. But it's just getting people immersed in that world, getting a feel for it. So that when the onset team. Come back from the shoot or even call us from the set. We're ready to go. We're on the same page as them as much as we possibly can be. We can hit the ground running.

But it was, you know, Mark Bakowski was the production supervisor and he's an ILMer, so it made things very easy in terms of transfer of information and, you know, we could ask questions without fear of embarrassment. And he could, you know, ask us, very easily.

[00:37:39] Rob Bredow: Yes.

When people think about, of course, building practical sets, it's unusual. I know it's happened before. I've heard of movies where it's happened. But it's unusual for people to walk into the finished set and say, Oh, no, it needs to be 15 percent bigger. Or, this hill needs to be over here. Because you just know, after you've gone and built the whole practical thing, that's very unlikely to be possible to do.

That said, on the digital side, sometimes all the complexity that goes into those digital environments doesn't felt like a physical place, so it can walk in and say, or you look at a shot and say, Oh, these buildings should be 15 percent bigger. Talk a little bit about Ed, when that is kind of easy to do because it is digital.

And the artist can very quickly make those changes. actually either of you, Anthony or Ed, uh, when, when you can quickly. make those changes and when you have to kind of get back in and reconstruct it because it's actually made out of bricks and all the bricks need to be laid out again even though they're digital there's actually a lot of steps to some of the notes that come in so how do you distinguish when it's an easy note that we can address quickly and flexibly in digital and when it's actually kind of a rebuild more akin to starting from scratch or let's say 50 percent of the way back

[00:38:39] Ed Randolph: Well, I think a key one is whether it's going to join onto anything real. If it's, if it's floating by itself, you can kind of go nuts with it to an extent. But if it's got to literally, you know, marry up to a real block on set, or, you know, something that's going to give the scale away, or the, you know, dimensions or angles, then, then you're a bit stuck.

It gets a bit more complicated. But, it didn't happen too much with us. There's a curvature. The Colosseum was a tricky one because it's round and that curvature, like the onset one, was a slightly tighter, oval than the original Colosseum. So that caused some interesting sort of back and forth making that sit in.

But, generally we didn't have huge problems moving things around.

[00:39:15] Rob Bredow: Especially in this film where so many of those streets were recreated digitally. You could literally move the camera from one set to the other, continuously with the virtual set that, from what I could tell from the work in progress, was actually very consistent from shot to shot, which is not always true in movie making.

A lot of this is smoke and mirrors, where you don't actually have to make the sets all interconnect, but I understand the team from the very beginning kind of laid out all the roads, and more or less stuck with that layout for many, many shots, so it really had that consistent appearance as if it was a real place.

[00:39:45] Ed Randolph: We did, they had, we were working with a classics professor who had actually built all of Rome and he gave this great reference of what this should look like. so that was a great starting point for us, to be able to, you know, base everything off, which Ridley kind of ignored thereafter.

But, you know, for that, like you say, for that consistency, not having to worry about what if we look left and right down here, that was already there. and you know, our environment team loves building those whole cities. There's, you know, completely immersing themselves in it.

[00:40:12] Jenny Ely: How closely did you have to, when you're talking about world building, and you have a previous movie that this is a sequel to, how much reference do you do to the first movie, or how closely do you have to make that look, or do you just say, that's a separate movie, we're going with a whole new look? I mean, I know the buildings are, you know, they're real, so you're basing them on, like you said, your architecture studies or whatever, but like, how do you tie it to the first movie?

[00:40:34] Ed Randolph: It, it's more of a feel. I mean, like the Colosseum for instance, at one point we were going down a route and making it much more historically accurate. But then it didn't have the same feel as Gladiator 1 of that just kind of enormity. That's, you know, really impressive. So we went more towards the cinematic.

Yeah. type of Colosseum, which ultimately is, you know, it does, it's much better result in the movie no one's going to really care when they're watching Paul Mescal, you know, walk in. Well, that looks, that looks incredibly accurate back there.

[00:41:05] Rob Bredow: Right. That's not the, that's not the bar you're measured against.

[00:41:08] Ed Randolph: Exactly.

[00:41:09] Rob Bredow: Yeah.

[00:41:10] Todd Vaziri: when you talk about using the first film as a cinematic inspiration, that's, I was going to ask about concept art when you get the concept art. It's like, that's. You know, it's almost intimidating to get this incredibly beautiful concept art, either done at ILM or done, by the production given to ILM.

And the big challenge with that usually is, okay, this concept art was made. And then they also built a set that, and they weren't necessarily in concert with one another. The folks designing and building this weren't necessarily aiming toward that look.

And sometimes there could be a disconnect between the way the sets were built or lit or choreographed with the concept art. And our job ultimately is to make all that work, make the photography work, make the set extensions, and then the ultimate, the full CG establishing shots. and, we love getting beautiful concept art because it gives us a guide.

And the concept art usually, I mean, a basis in reality, a basis in physics, but a lot of that stuff is you have to get fanciful even in a historical drama, even in a non fantastical world. And I mean, that's what makes movies fun. I mean, movies are not documentaries. They are, you're not supposed to get your facts from theatrical Hollywood movies.

But it's all about flourishing. And like you said, Rob. There's very few directors who are better than Ridley Scott at creating a beautiful image. Just a shot. Just a lock off shot. the way the light and dark god rays contrast atmospherics. And, everything I've seen of Gladiator II so far fulfills that.

Absolutely.

[00:42:56] Anthony Smith: I was going to say, that even though we were in a, an utterly different world, we still tried to have that framework of connectivity between all of the places, like there is a, there's a map in, in the movie on a wall, you know, we, we took that map from production design and just thought about, okay, this is there, this is there, this is there, how do they relate to each other?

So what might we see if we're looking in a particular direction? and even, The bulk of ILM's work was at the end of this movie, and there's a bit of a journey that goes on through the palace within Emerald City, and there's a number of locations that we had to extend or build, and we definitely tried to envision how they would be connected through the palace.

And that, I think what that does is it gives the artists a really good base for everything. Otherwise they could go in many, many different directions and make assumptions about what you might see. But to have a base keeps everyone consistent to a degree. But of course we're making movies and as soon as you point a camera in a direction and you go, nah, shouldn't we move that thing over there?

It would look cooler. Then you deviate. But to have that consistent base is great. And you always deviate once you point a camera at something. so our, the way we built things was, was kind of modular, especially once we got up to the top and we were looking down at the city. All the towers were movable, depending on where the camera was pointing. But yeah, the base framework there just helps to build the world. It keeps things feeling like a solid place.

[00:44:22] Rob Bredow: So, when you're working either on a shot or a portion of a sequence, Anthony, and you want to pitch an idea up, in your case, to, to John Chu, up to Pablo, the head of department of visual effects supervisor, up to the ranks, just talk a little bit about that process, how you, you know, maybe you're addressing a note and you have an idea of how to plus it further, or somebody on the team does.

Let's talk a little bit about the constant improvement that happens, both in the world building and the shot design, just as you're going through the process of building a show as complicated as Wicked.

[00:44:50] Anthony Smith: it obviously all starts from John, the director's brief about his idea of something. Often, he's able to express what he likes or doesn't like about what was shot, what he wants to achieve. That maybe wasn't achievable there and what the challenges might be. Sometimes that is, open. Sometimes it's not.

It's quite definite. And this is very common, I think, with everyone creative. They kind of maybe have an idea or they're like, I feel like I need this. and John was great at offering us the chance to create options. and really appreciating the options that we gave. And I, I try to do the same thing internally with the team.

So I, I feel like John or Pablo wants this, but maybe we try a few things. Maybe we tilt faster. Maybe we need to settle for a beat on the view, or move some things around for compositional purposes. And we try and, it depends where, what department is doing that work, but, offering those options up.

Kind of absorbing the options, I suppose, from the artists, trying to filter down to the important ones, and then offering those up to Pablo and then, and then John. I think it's really helped with this movie as well. There's, a lot of options that could be done. So we try to offer up as many reasonable ones as we can.

[00:46:01] Rob Bredow: Yeah. And Ed, while we're talking about these movies with so many moving parts, the production teams, I think, put the industrial, in industrial light and magic, it really is the powerhouse, and that partnership between creative and production is, the way we've been able to reliably deliver movies for, you know, coming up to 50 years.

What are some of the key things that make that work here culturally and just workflow wise from your perspective in the production teams on these hugely complex shows. What are some of the things that are top of mind for you and the things you enjoy about that, that process?

[00:46:32] Ed Randolph: I think a real key part of it, is curiosity from the production team, because obviously, you know, from a technical point of view, there's a lot you're not going to know, and maybe you don't need to know, but I think it's, important to want to try and understand what the problem is we're trying to fix here from a technical, logistical schedule, or you know, all the different variables we're trying to fulfill, and to ask a lot of questions.

Supervisors love a meeting. No, you know, at the beginning of the show, there's a lot of meetings. It's a lot of like, let's talk about how we're going to do this. And it does, you know, it can be a bit wearing sometimes, but it's so important that stage, because you want as a supervisor, I would think and leads, et cetera, you want your production team to understand what everyone is trying to do here, what the problem is, how we're going to try and get there and then empower that production team.

To find solutions and they might be doing it by themselves or, you know, working with, with the artists and leads to come up with a plan. But I think that the most crucial point is that everyone is on the same page. I think it sounds a bit cliche, but I think actually that everyone ultimately has the same job.

You want to deliver the best possible work on time, on budget, hopefully having fun while you're doing it. That's, that's the really hard part.

[00:47:40] Rob Bredow: That's right.

[00:47:41] Ed Randolph: But I think within that though, it's just the difference between production and supervision and the artist has varying degrees of responsibility. The decisions you're making are slightly different, but you are all aiming in the same direction.

I think it's dangerous to think that the production is just do with numbers and spreadsheets. Likewise, the supervisors and artists just think about pretty pictures. There's a middle ground there where we all meet and gladiator was a great example of that. You know, Me and Pietro, the supervisor, it's just on the same page the whole time, and some days it's just checking in, everything good, yep, good, that's it.

You know, once the machine is up and running, you might not need to have too many conversations, but all that groundwork early on is the key to get to that point, to know that you all got the same targets in mind.

[00:48:24] Rob Bredow: I love the way you describe that as curiosity. When I first got here to ILM, I joined about 10 years ago. And I was educated as to how sophisticated the production teams are with the ILM pipeline. As a newcomer, I was experienced in computer graphics, but not experienced in ILM. I learned so much about ILM's pipeline from the production teams who knew it extremely well.

And I think that's really the mark of an excellent supervisor and an excellent production person or producer, is that constant curiosity and that desire to learn more about the way the work is going to be done. And in many of the shows that we're talking, both the shows we're talking about here and many of the shows that are on both of your resumes, these are shows where you're inventing new workflows as you're going through due to the complexity or due to the kind of things, illusions we're creating.

So that always invites that kind of curiosity, which is great.

[00:49:13] The Martini

[00:49:13] Rob Bredow: Well, this has been really fun. We are basically out of time already, so we should transition to our last segment to talk about our martinis. Our last shot of the day, something we think is cool that is out there. Todd, let me hand you off to you for your martini.

[00:49:28] Todd Vaziri: Sure, I'm going to do my typical thing where I'm going to recommend two things, you know, and it's two animated movies about robots. And you're like, do we really need more animated movies about robots? And the answer is yes. Anybody who has seen The Wild Robot or Robot Dreams would agree with that because they couldn't be further from each other in terms of style.

And, a lot of tone issues because Robot Dreams is mostly dialogue free and isn't the most elaborate, drawing style or animation style that you could possibly dream up, but it is so heartful and it is so soulful, anybody can sit down and enjoy this movie. It is just a wonderful movie.

It came out last year and it was nominated for the, uh, animated feature, Academy Award last year. That's great. And then more recently, what came out was The Wild Robot just, I cannot wait to see it again. I think I cried three or maybe even four times watching it. stunningly beautiful, rich and gorgeous, like a weird amalgam of.

High technology computer graphics animation and painterly almost like a hand painted feel to it and a very universal story. so both of those are fabulous movies, Wild Robot and Robot Dreams.

[00:50:46] Rob Bredow: Thanks for those recommendations, yeah, Chris Sanders, such a fan of Chris Sanders, and he's done again with The Wild Robot. Ed.

[00:50:52] Ed Randolph: Well, because Todd did it, I'm going to do two, too. And as we're talking about, just a small one, as we're talking about Wicked this week, the Tiny Desk, uh, NPR Tiny Desk concerts on YouTube, which I think are just some of the best things on YouTube, full stop. But the Wicked one is really great. And if like me, I've actually seen the stage show, I think it's from about a year ago for the 20th, 20th or 25th anniversary of the show, they had Stephen Schwartz, the original composer and lyricist, in the studio playing the piano with the two of the Broadway leads singing and it's, it's great.

But my main one is, if you're not all cried out from the robot films, there is a documentary called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, which has been on Netflix about two weeks, I think two or three weeks. And it's the story of a guy, a boy who was dealt a rough hand, born with a degenerative muscular disease, which meant that for most of his life he was housebound, and actually for the last few years of his life he was trapped in his own body, he could only move a few fingers.

And he spent a lot of time online playing World of Warcraft. He sadly died in his mid twenties, and it's about his family coming to terms with, thinking about how much they loved their son worrying that he didn't matter to the world. No one ever got to meet him. But then discovering after they announced his death on a blog that actually had this huge base of friends through World of Warcraft. And he really meant something to them in a very kind of way when you see the film, very deep personal ways, not just as a gamer. And you don't have to know anything about World of Warcraft, which I didn't. It sounds really depressing, but it's incredibly uplifting. But you will cry. My wife cried within two minutes of it starting.

[00:52:18] Rob Bredow: Oh man.

[00:52:19] Ed Randolph: I think if you've got kids, you're in trouble. By the end, we're absolute wrecks. But it's a fantastic documentary.

[00:52:24] Rob Bredow: What a great recommendation. Well, we'll link to those four things so far. And let me throw it over to Anthony.

[00:52:30] Anthony Smith: Mine isn't actually a movie. When, when I, I've sort of given talks to students and things like that. One, and they say, what, what can I do to improve my work? I often tell them to carry a sketch pad and draw things. and I say, not because I want you to have great drawing skills or anything like that.

It's about making you look at the picture. Things. Yeah, and see things and try and just understand why they look the way they do. Because you know, a lot of our job is trying to make things look photographic, real, however you want to describe it. but recently, not that recently, but fairly recently, I've, I've taken up some painting. Work and I did a, I did a short course where it was about the techniques of the old masters and you had to kind of replicate an old master painting. and I've found that actually there's quite a correlation in terms of learning, learning how to do something like that with what we do, because a lot of what we do internally is we talk about the, how far you go in terms of the technical finish of, of our work and how much time you put into, doing something that maybe, maybe someone's not going to notice.

And I've personally found a lot of correlation with looking at artwork and just sort of thinking about, ah, they've, they've really focused there. That's where my eye is drawn. That's where the time was spent. And over here, it's just a load of messy paint strokes. And it doesn't actually matter because no one really You don't need to have the detail over there.

And I've just, when I lived in London, I used to love walking around the galleries there. Not so much in Australia, but, having got back into doing a bit of art, a bit of painting, it's kind of reconnected back to some of the VFX work and a bit of understanding what's important and what's not with that kind of thing.

So, look at paintings.

[00:54:16] Rob Bredow: There you go. We have, we're lucky to have some of the original matte paintings on glass here in the building here in San Francisco.

And it's shocking to me that they look completely photographic, photographically real in the movie. And there are many of them that have very broad strokes, are incredibly loose in sections, but they completely fool the eye exactly as you're talking about.

And I think there's an incredible lesson to be learned there about putting our effort exactly as you described, where you're going to be looking and where you need the detail. It's such good, such good advice. That's great. Jenny.

[00:54:49] Jenny Ely: Yeah, so I think I'm doing a movie for the first time this week as a martini. I chose, because we're coming up on the holiday season, I chose A Smoky Mountain Christmas, which is a 1986 made for TV movie starring Dolly Parton and Lee Majors. It is directed by Henry Winkler. This is not even the most bizarre part yet.

I'm going to read you the synopsis for this. “A country singer and a mountain man rescue seven runaway orphans from a sheriff and a witch. So,

That's Smoky, uh, and a witch. Yeah, so I grew up in the Smoky Mountains, very close to where Dolly Parton is from. And so my grandmother recorded this on VHS off of TV, so my sister and I watched it around Christmas every year.

And because I was used to it, I did not realize how bizarre this movie is until I showed it to my husband a couple of years ago. and I don't have a VCR anymore, so I had to go spelunking into the depths of the internet to find this thing, because it's not available on streaming. It was made for TV movies, so.

I did find it on YouTube, and I showed it to him, and he started asking me all these questions about it. He was just in shock, and I thought, I have a lot of questions about this movie, too. So, like, how did seven seemingly unrelated orphans end up living alone together in the mountains to be rescued by a country music singer?

And how did they get a Last minute custody hearing on Christmas Eve, so none of these questions, by the way, actually get answered in the movie. but I do get nostalgic every time I watch it. There's lots of fun cameos. John Ritter is in it. Both of Ron Howard's parents are in this movie. and there are, Original Christmas songs.

Yes, it is kind of a musical. So there's original Christmas music by Dolly Parton and I think you can still find it on YouTube still, but I'll link in the show notes. But if you want something delightful and charming and really, really witchcrafty and Christmas weird, A Smoky Mountain Christmas with Dolly Parton is what I recommend.

[00:56:48] Todd Vaziri: So you're saying don't wait for the 4k blu ray You know, for

[00:56:53] Jenny Ely: Not coming.

[00:56:53] Todd Vaziri: Probably not gonna happen? Okay.

[00:56:55] Jenny Ely: It's not coming. Yeah, I've been waiting for a remake, but I think it's probably just too weird for that.

[00:57:00] Rob Bredow: Jenny, why am I not surprised that you managed the smooth transition from spooky season to spooky Christmas in your recommendations? I love it. It's great.

[00:57:08] Jenny Ely: That must have been why I loved it, because of witchcraft. Which seemed totally fine to me, that there was mountain witchcraft in a Christmas movie when I was a kid, so I don't know.

[00:57:15] Rob Bredow: As one expects

[00:57:16] Jenny Ely: It's definitely entertaining.

[00:57:18] Rob Bredow: A Smoky Mountain Christmas

[00:57:19] Jenny Ely: Yup.

[00:57:20] Rob Bredow: my martini is Clarkson's Farm. It's a documentary for the guy who hosted Top Gear for all those years. And, he moved out to a farm. A couple hours west of London, I presume.

I have never been, but it is a beautiful, beautiful place. And then he lives the life of a farmer. He's got help and he's got money, but you get to see what that life is really like. And what's really wonderful is of course, the people, the cast, the people that are actually working the farm, and you get to meet some real personalities who couldn't care less that this is a documentary or couldn't care less that he's a famous, presenter on lots of shows on the BBC and that he's rich.

it's just, you know, you still need to move that dirt from point A to point B to do the next part of the farming and, It's actually really, really charming and endearing, and we've enjoyed it. I think we're three seasons in. I saw that the fifth season just got announced. They come to different countries at different times.

I think we're a little delayed here in the U. S. But if you get a chance to see Clarkson's Farm, I think it's in different places in different countries. So hopefully you can find that if it sounds like something fun to you. Very relaxing, and one of those things we smile about and enjoy as a family.

[00:58:30] Outtro

[00:58:30] Rob Bredow: Well, thank you so much for listening to the Lighter Darker podcast today. Both Gladiator II and Wicked opened this last weekend in theaters. So if you get a chance to see those, we recommend it. Really fun movies for us to get to work on. They're really fun movies to watch.

If you have a question for the show, or you'd like to suggest a topic for us, email us at lighterdarker@ilm.com. You can also contact us or follow us on social media. Our links are all in the show notes, and you can find everything for the show on ilm.com/lighterdarker. And we also post the transcripts there.

So thank you so much for leaving us reviews. We really appreciate it in the Apple podcast app or anywhere. You listen to the show, leave us a review, you know, tell everybody you like the show. It helps people find it. And we want to thank Industrial Light & Magic for hosting the Lighter Darker podcast.

This show is produced by Jenny Ely and myself, Rob Bredow. Today's episode has been edited by David Dovell, and we want to thank ILM's PR team, led by Greg Grusby, who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make all this happen. So thank you for listening to the Lighter Darker podcast, and until next time, may your pixels be both lighter and darker.

Are we calling this Glicked, or are we just going to say the Gladiator and Wicked episode? Because I haven't seen Glicked in the press as much as I thought I might.

[00:59:51] Todd Vaziri: I like Gladiator and Wicked

[00:59:52] Rob Bredow: Yeah, I think that's it

Worldbuilding in Gladiator II and Wicked

[00:59:55] Ed Randolph: Yeah, sounds

[00:59:56] Rob Bredow: Yeah.

[00:59:57] Todd Vaziri: We were trying desperately to make fetch happen, and I don't think fetch happened.